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Hello! Ohisashiburi desu ne!

It’s been so long since I last posted anything on here I do wonder if I have any readers left at all! Sorry about that – it’s been a hectic year for me which culminated in moving from Wales, where I’ve lived for much of the last decade, to West Yorkshire in northern England. I can now sit at my desk and enjoy wonderful views of the Pennines, which is a little more inspiring than the wall I previously had for company behind my monitor. Still enough about me, lets talk products!

Gate Keeper

Mountain Lion is now upon us, and with it Apple is ushering in a new technology called Gate Keeper that is intended to help keep your Mac safe by not letting you run software from untrusted sources. By default Apple gives the green light to anything downloaded from the Mac App Store, as you would expect, and to applications that are signed with a developer ID that has been registered with them.

As of posting this, both iKanji and iKana are signed and will work as normal when downloaded on Mountain Lion. NewsLife is still pending an update with signing, but given it sells pretty much exclusively through the Mac App Store at the moment it’s not the highest priority. InstantGallery is more problematic. The code base of 1.8 has grown very crufty over the years and I’ve spent quite a few hours going over it trying to modernise it only to find more and more bits of it unravelling. At this point I’m about ready to say InstantGallery 1.8 is end of life and won’t be officially supported under Mountain Lion. This doesn’t mean InstantGallery as a product is dead however. The near mythical 2.0 version which much surely even beat TextMate 2 in it’s appearance of abandonment, is still getting worked on when I have time and I really, honest to gods, will try and get it released this year. Especially now IG 1.8 is EOL, I want to get it replaced and consigned to the history books now.

Happily Gate Keeper won’t stop you using unsigned apps that were already on your Mac before you upgraded to Mountain Lion so there’s no immediate concern of it breaking any ThinkMac apps you’ve already downloaded. There are also a couple of workarounds should the need arise – you can either turn off Gate Keeper, which I don’t recommend, or control/right click on an app and choose Open from the contextual menu to bypass Gate Keeper on a per-use basis.

More app news

iKanji 2 is progressing nicely now, it introduces spaced repetition to the Mac version at last and includes a new vocabulary training module because I think it really helps to learn kanji in the context or words rather than just in isolation. I hope to have it released by the autumn.

In iOS land I have an update to iKanji touch brewing and even a new product that’s been in development since last year. The focus at the moment is on the Mac side of things however so please hang on for these a bit longer.